The Inspirational David Goggins

Hey everyone,
Hope your Wednesday has been pretty good. Was happy to see that the recent depression video is on the first page of /r/videos (at least it was... for a bit - near the bottom. But I'll take that.)
If any redditors are on here, here's a link to the post: https://bit.ly/2lULniI

It's been a while since I've watched a video or listened to a podcast that was particularly "motivating." Hearing or reading about a new topic or some interesting piece of health/brain/psychology information will get me excited, but that's a little different. Today I want to share David Goggins with y'all.
 

I was at a cafe, listening to "Joe Rogan Experience #1080 - David Goggins" - didn't intend to listen to the whole thing, but one hour later (had it on 2x) the video finished and closed up my laptop around 11PM (don't recommend listening to it if it's close to your bed time). I then went home and did 100 pull-ups to get rid of some pent up energy. (Not that big of a deal - Goggins broke the pull up record in 2013 with 4,025 pull-ups in 17 hours, but I've never done 100 in one go so it was good enough for me.) [This was also the first Goggins task for Jesse Itzler]

Goggins is an ultra marathon runner - in 2007 he placed 3rd overall in the Bad Water 135 mile race, running it in 25 hours 49 minutes. 

The story of how he got into ultra marathon running was what really got me jazzed, especially considering I've been disappointed with my paltry performance in my first marathon I did last year in Yamanashi. That story real quick: 

I was planning to use this as a chance to do a video talking about running, carb loading, the keto diet, and why salt is so vital for endurance sports.
▪️I had been eating keto and the morning of the race I ate nothing.
▪️Started off to a reasonable pace (decent for how little I trained - basically only started training two and a half weeks before),
felt a huge dip in energy after a while, took some salt, got a lot of my energy back and kept going.
▪️Everything seemed to be going pretty good, buuut right around the point where I had ran the farthest in my life, the fact that I have flat feet (and was wearing just regular shoes...) caught up with me and I started to get a very sharp tearing sensation in my foot with each step. This slowed me to a walk, but I tightly wrapped some athletic tape around my soles and upgraded to a brisk hobble/jog. I can't remember my exact time but it was not good - over five hours. 

Boo hoo, poor me and my feet. So, what's the Goggins story? (If you'd rather hear it from him, here's the timestamp where he talks about it w/ Joe Rogan  [37:57])
 
He wanted a way to raise money for the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, so he googled "10 hardest races in the world" - At this point he knew nothing about ultra-running. What came up in the search was "The Bad Water 135" - a 135 mile run through death valley in the summer time. 

So he calls up the race director (Chris Kostman) and Kostman says "Are you an ultra runner?"
Goggins says no but I was a Navy Seal, I did this and that. Kostman says "I don't care, you have to qualify for my race." The deadline was up in 2 months for this Badwater race. Long story short, Kostman tells Goggins there's a race he can run on Saturday (this conversation is taking place on a Wednesday) where you run around a 1 mile track for 24 hours. Kostman says if Goggins can get a 100 miles in 24 hours he will consider him for the Badwater race. 

At the time, he was a Navy Seal doing mainly body builder-like training. His cardio consisted of 20 minutes on an elliptical trainer, 20 minutes on Sundays - in his words "fuck that cardio stuff." "I probably ran, no shit, no shit, no more than 50 miles the whole year. That wasn't my thing, I wanted to be jacked." 

So Goggins shows up to the race weighing at least 230 pounds with Ritz Crackers and Myoplex (some protein shake?) to keep him going.
He gets to mile 40, mile 50 keeping a good pace and is "feeling pretty good" (what.), but after about 12 hours total, when he gets to mile 70 he's in the "worst pain of [his] life." (Keep in mind he's been through Navy Seal Hell Week three times) He sits down. 

He's there in a lawn chair, very dizzy, not seeing right - he needs to go to the bathroom but can't get himself up to get the port-o-potty 20 feet away. He craps his pants and pees blood down his leg. 

He had stress fractures in both his lower legs and at this point he says "my feet were broken" - I didn't realize he literally meant the small bones in his feet were all broken until Joe Rogan's podcast with Jesse Itzler who was actually at that race with Goggins.

Then, he wraps his ridiculously swollen ankles and splinted shins up with a crap ton of compression tape and walks for 11 miles. At mile 81 his wife says "You're not going to make the time." After hearing that, he immediately started running and kept going for 20 miles at a 10:30 pace for a total of 101 miles for 18 hours 56 minutes. 

Two weeks later, he goes to a marathon he had previously signed up for in Vegas. Is two weeks enough to recover from the broken foot bones, stress fractures, and Rhabdomyolysis plus whatever other ailments he had from the 100 mile race? Of course not. Before the Vegas marathon started, he was planning to just walk the race with his mother. In his words, at that point "I couldn't walk. I could not walk. I was fucked up." 

But, when the gun for the start of the race went off, he just started running. He qualified for the Boston Marathon with a time of 3 hours 8 minutes. 

Dang... There go my excuses. I think I'll do another marathon.

P.S. The next video should be out this weekend. It's about some methods I use for examining information, but there's a good amount of commentary on antidepressants.